Tag: Self Service

In what is already a competitive landscape, 2018 saw a record number (626) of mergers and acquisitions among insurance brokers. According to Business Insurance reporting, more than half of these deals involved P&C brokers and agents.

At the same time, Earnst & Young’s US and Americas non-life insurance outlook 2019 points out that a “gradual shift toward direct sales can be seen in personal and small commercial lines.” While the report holds that the proliferation of D2C channels that reduce dependency on brokers is unlikely to have a significant impact on large commercial lines in the near future, the trend can and should be taken as a sign of things to come.

Origami Risk’s 2018 User Conference, held last week, utilized a new format that not only placed a premium on client presentation of use cases, but also focused on digging into “how” presenters managed to implement their specific solutions. Listening to a diverse set of cases, several common trends emerged.

1. Transparency is key

Many of those presenting echoed the need to establish transparency and accountability in their processes. You can’t measure what you can’t see, and you can’t improve what you don’t measure. The most obvious culprits were paper-based procedures—everything from workplace safety “coaching cards,” to incident intake reports. Spreadsheet-centric workflows, such as data-heavy values collection efforts, also failed to identify the “who, what, when, and where” type of information required to make any process fully transparent.

In the Accenture Technology Vision for Insurance 2017 Report, nearly 9 out of 10 respondents stated, “their organizations must innovate at an increasingly rapid pace just to keep a competitive edge.” Despite this technological arms race among TPAs, much of the focus remains on backend systems, which may drive some operational efficiencies but fall short in alluring tech savvy customers. …read more

When clients are actively engaged with their carrier, the organization gains the opportunity to provide higher value services that can help clients make strategic decisions and drive down costs. Paper-based and labor-intensive processes, legacy systems that struggle with modern requirements, and data siloed in disparate, unconnected applications all run counter to this effort. Origami Risk, however, provides several features that allow carriers to fully engage with their clients and deliver actionable, strategic data that can impact clients’ bottom line.

Meeting the Modern Demands of Today’s Client

In our recent Trends That Will Shape 2018 post, we highlighted how the increasing demand for 24/7 access to information and self-service is expanding from the consumer market into all types of organizations. For insureds and agents, this translates into a desire for greater access to critical data, and to have it customized to fit with the way they want to work with it. …read more

2017 was an eventful year in business. From record-setting natural disasters, to high profile announcements on technology choices, to the expansion of self-service technology further into all sectors of business, businesses faced several key challenges this year. We’ve put together a list of trends in 2018 that may emerge from these issues.

Renewed Focus on Disaster Recovery/Continuity

With a record-setting hurricane season and overall losses estimated at over $360B, Munich Re reports that 2017 was the second most expensive year for natural disasters ever recorded. In the US alone, fires ravaged California and the pacific northwest, floods and hurricanes struck the southeast, and no fewer than five major tornado/hail outbreaks occurred, each causing more than $1B in losses. Globally, the past year’s other disasters included typhoons, severe flooding, earthquakes and volcano eruptions. Ernst Rauch, head of Munich Re’s Corporate Climate Center, stated that these patterns were likely to continue. “We have a new normal. 2017 was not an outlier.”

As businesses are faced with operating in environments where large scale natural disasters are increasingly common, expect to see a renewed focus on disaster recovery and business continuity. Rebounding from these events and returning to normal operations will become another factor on which businesses need to compete. One of our clients used Origami Risk to monitor and track the progress of relocations and reopenings after the floodings in Houston, demonstrating an innovative way to utilize RMIS technology to overcome these challenges.